Emile Cohl Has Me Hooked On Abstract Animation

Posted by on Feb 15, 2012 in Animation, DePaul University CDM, General | 0 comments

Well he’s one one many that have me developing a taste for abstract animation this quarter. One of the cool classes I’m taking this Winter of 2012 is ANI422 Animation Styles and Techniques. I guess since my eye has begun to get attuned to abstract painting over the last few months, appreciating the abstract in digital media should be perfectly natural I guess.

The quarter began with us learning about some of the European pioneers of animation. They came along in the 19th century during the advent of film technology when people were first being mesmerized by moving images of people on a screen. Cohl is credited as being the first to amaze with illustrations that came to life on this new medium. His film Fantasmogorie is the standard reference in animation circles when it comes to how it was done more than a century ago.

His morphing figures make me go “ooh and ahh” now, even with his rudimentary motions, decades before the fundamentals of animation were established. During the quarter our projects are to be inspired by the variety of short films that we reveiw in class each week and our professor Lisa Barcy typically likes us make our shorts 10-30 seconds long. The abstract inspired my so here is my homage to the original master.

What do you think of my first effort? I plan to do more abstract (oftern referred to as “experimental” in modern animation parlance) inspired animation over time, as I continue to learn and research the topic so stay tuned to the blog for more.

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My Animation Graduate Seminar in Review

Posted by on Dec 29, 2011 in DePaul University CDM | 0 comments

At the beginning of the past Fall Quarter I shared my expectations of grad seminar as laid out by our professor Lisa Barcy. I wasn’t able to keep you updated over the quarter so I’m catching you up at the end. With our reading assignments and short film viewing in class each week I learned a lot of animation history and along with the background of different types of animation.
Such history makers as Winsor McCay turned out to be inspiration for my exploration of animating water during the term. He was masterful with his realistic representation of the element in The Sinking of the Lusitania. I also enjoyed Daniel Sousa’s Minotaur for it’s creative aquatic animation and the effective metaphorical use of it.

 
Here are my two papers on each of those films in flip book form.
 


 


 
Since I got so much practice using Flash in my Animation Mechanics course I decided to use it for my graduate seminar final as well. Lisa makes sure that we are ultimately producing some work even in her lecture classes and this one was no different. Check out my final project below as I get into my head and look towards the future.
 


 

The highlight of the term was our almost weekly guest lecturer. We had great visits from guest animators like Wayne Brechja the owner of Calabash Animation. This is a legendary Chicago based animation company so it was a real treat having Wayne share his insights on how they do their thing.

Some of our professors talked to us as well. Had a roaring time from Devin Bell who told us about his start in school. He showed his old student project Crank Balls that landed him into a career at JibJab. Meghann Artes shared some of her work with us including student film from her days at U.C.L.A. She’s worked at a bunch of places including Sesame Street. Jo Derry not only shared her unconventional, don’t-plan-it-all-out-before-you-start approach to animating her work, she answered the all important “How much do animators charge for a project?” question (thank you Jo, I’m revising my pricing structure as I type).

We gave presentations to each other as well. It’s always interesting to see classmates talents and learn what inspires and motivates them to do their art the way they do it. I’m pretty sure some great future collaborations will come of it. I have some REALLY talented classmates.

We did lots of reading and wrote a paper a week. One of the more interesting pieces of reading was Colourful Claims: towards a theory of animated documentary. It’s a philosophical take on animation as documentary tool, whether animation can be considered legit documentary since the characters portraying the action aren’t actual living beings.

 
We had a variety of animation related events that we could write about as well. One that was particularly interesting to me was the CartoonInk!: Emerging Comics In Context exhibit at one the the Art Institute of Chicago’s galleries in the Loop. It was an exhibit of alternative comics with a variety of subject matter, artistic styles and methods of print publishing. I have never seen such a wide variety of book styles.

One paper was an out our comfort zone paper focusing on an artistic style that we didn’t work with. I chose a recent mosaic Reaching Back; Moving Forward, Lest We Forget the Song of 47th St. Its a bricolage mural dedicated to the African American history of the neighborhood. Here are a few pics of the piece. Listen to the lead artist, Carolyn Elaine, tell you more about it.

 


 

 
This was a great seminar and I have a lot of conceptual take-aways that I use for future projects. The Winter Quarter lies ahead. I’m ready to rock and roll with the next of the two new classes in the cohort.

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My Animation Mechanics Class In Review

Posted by on Dec 26, 2011 in DePaul University CDM | 0 comments

I posted on being part of the first cohort of this first course back in October in the middle of the fall quarter. I learned lots more since then and wanted to share it here. We continued using The Animator’s Survival Kit(this is the link to the more recent Expanded Edition) and Timing for Animation as our main texts There were three projects since that last post and I’ll give you some background on each.

This short was a study in vibration. We used a leaf at the end of a long stem blowing in the wind as the example to animate in class. It involved alternating a series of frames and repeating some of them to mimic a back and forth motion. I extended the principle to show the roaring dragon’s head moving back and forth. I felt like I was really beginning to get comfortable with Flash by the time we got to this project at week seven of the term.

 

 

This next film was more practice with the vibration principle. I used an alternating sequence of two sets of lips to create the effect of fluttering lips. One set of lips was a series of frames that extended away from the mouth. The other set of puckered lips were in-betweened with the first set of lips to create the exaggerated cartooned effect of snoring.
The original project was a few seconds shorter than this due to the turn-in deadline so I went back into the file and duplicated the lip sequences a few extra times to make my snoozing character more lifelike.

 

 

The final project though, is the work I’m most proud of so far. Our professor, Scott Roberts, introduced us to a new book, Elemental Magic, The Art of Special Effects Animation, by Joseph Gilland. He’s known for his expertise in drawing and animating natural phenomena like fire, smoke and water. I’ve always wanted to study how to represent water so this book was a golden find for me. I recommend it for every animator in addition to his most recent Elemental Magic, Volume II: The Technique of Special Effects Animation which is the one I used the most.
Needless to say I made it a point to include it in my final project below. The objective was to incorporate four of the principles we learned along with a narwhal. I think Scott was just challenging our story telling talents with that last detail. I included A) winged flight, B) vibration (the tent), C) fire, D) water…and the narwhal.

 

 

My animation skills definitely went up a notch this fall. Can’t wait to continue on the development of my during the winter quarter in January.

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My ANI421 Animation Mechanics Class

Posted by on Oct 10, 2011 in Artists, DePaul University CDM | 0 comments

ANI421 is the first of the new cohort of courses for the Master of Arts in Animation program that was recently split of from the Master of Science in Cinema program. Animation was previously just a concentration of DePaul’s College of Computing and Digital Media‘s cinema curriculum but we now have our own standalone degree program as of this fall 2011 quarter!!!

Our professor for this class is Scott Roberts who heads up the animation program within the School of Cinema and Interactive Media. He’s a renowned digital artist in his own right so we’re getting the benefit of a wealth of experience.

Scott has us focusing on the fundamentals of effective animated motion. We’re digging into the details of many of the 12 Principles of Animation as outlined in The Animator’s Survival Kit. Our other reference is Timing for Animation which is helping us learn how to move different parts of the body at different speeds.

At this point at least we’re focused on using stick figures in Flash to be sure we nail down the principles. Some of my classmates are really accomplished artists so they are beyond stick people. Drawing on a monitor is definitely different than drawing on paper but I plan on getting beyond the stick people too before the end of the term as I get more comfortable with sketching poses in the software. In the meantime I’ll share some of what I’ve made so far.

 


 

 

 

 

 
After four weeks I’m really getting a lot out of this class. I’ll be able to apply this to any of my future 2D and 3D work. Can’t wait to see what’s next.

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Behind the Scenes of My Interview With Illustrator, Animator and Logo Designer Russ Cox

Posted by on Aug 10, 2011 in Artists | 0 comments

The interview you’re about to watch was one of the potential subjects of my final project during the Spring 2011 quarter at DePaul University’s College of Computing and Digital Media (The CDM Baby!). The task assigned by my DC489 “The Big Picture” course professor Dan Pal was to interview someone in the entertainment business. Russ Cox, owner of Smiling Otis Studio was one of two artists I contacted who agreed to a live interview.

I contacted him through LinkedIn. That won’t surprise those of you who know I am huge believer in the power of social media for networking. I don’t exactly recall how I came across Russ’s profile, probably a LinkedIn group, but two things caught my attention. First was his profile picture with one of his characters popping out of the top his hat but also his hilarious bio (read the funny Summary section). His summary is so well written that I rewrote mine in narrative form as he had done. I realized it’s O.K. to use humor in your profile even on a forum as professional as LinkedIn so my Summary isn’t stiff like the original version.

At any rate that was the impetus to formally connect our profiles then I messaged a request for an interview. He was happy to help an emerging fellow artist and we worked out the details. Take a look at the interview and I’ll continue with the backstory on the other side.

 

 

The method I arranged for was a recorded Skype interview via the VOD Burner system. VOD Burner is a downloadable program that connects to your Skype video call and records it. You can then save and edit the video conference in a variety of formats. I’m a Skype pro but this was my first time using the recording program and I had a couple of issues that I needed to work around.

Although Russ and I were able to see each other and converse through our computer cameras VOD didn’t record my half of the video portion. It processed my audio just fine but you’ll notice in the two panel layout that the left side is green opposite Russ’s video on the right. My face should be where the green is. Somehow it didn’t work out. Don’t know if I didn’t have the settings correct or if the program flaked out but it called on my sense of creativity to make it work.

I initially imported the VOD Burner files into Adobe Premier Pro, my favorite film editing package. For some reason Premier Pro and VOD were not agreeing with each other (I won’t bore you with the time wasted on figuring out how to process the VOD interview footage into a useful format). For some reason Premier Pro garbled the QuickTime files. Never had that problem before, nothing but a headache this time. Adobe After Effects wound up being the tool for the job.

Since my smiling face was nowhere to be seen I inserted a series of images into the left panel and used the green as border for each of them. In the middle segment you’ll see a transition to a single screen. I simply moved the dual panel to the left centering Russ’s face on the screen and inserted black layer over the green panel. Then it switches back to the dual  screen layout for the last part of the interview. This forced technical adjustment helped me to give the interview some additional visual interest. Plus, I now know how to do multiple video layouts within a film intentional for future projects.

The other adjustment that took some time figuring out was how to adjust the VOD default frame rate (30 frames per second OR fps) to the standard 24 fps that I’m used to. Didn’t know how to change it on the VOD side and neither Premier Pro nor After Effects could adjust it after I imported the files. These differing settings resulted in the audio and video being out of sync.

I finally figured out that I had to use two copies of each segment as individual tracks, one track for audio only (by turning off the video) and the other track for video only (by turning off the audio). This allowed my to slide the audio track ahead of the video by a few frames in order for words and mouth to match up again. Five frame seemed to do the trick. With all manner of audio visual trickery I finally got it to where it needed to be. Such is the life of animators and film makers. Obstacles sonstantly present learning opportunities to get the job done.

I hoped you enjoyed the interview and learned a lot from Russ as I did. And if you’re an Adobe software user be sure to save this post for reference in case of future problems of your own. Leave comments, tell me what you learned or tell me what you thought of my aesthetic choices and workarounds.

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